Chimera

“Don’t even ask me how the advance is going, okay?” his friend said when he saw Kongara walking up. He then sighed, smiled and grabbed Kongara by the shoulders.

“Glad to see you are still alive, buddy boy!”

“And I see you haven’t drowned into the pool of slush you have going outside there!” Kongara shook his head towards the tent entrance. Then both men lost their smiles.

Time to get back to it…

“Trouble?” Kongara asked. His colleague grunted.

“You don’t know the half of it. The reconnaissance force ran into an advancing party of Chinese armor heading south about an hour ago. Four commie T-99s here…” he pointed on the map and continued: “Our boys lost three BMPs within seconds. The Nag missile vehicles further south nailed all four T-99s within minutes though.”

“How did they take us by surprise? I thought we had drones overhead!” Kongara exclaimed, running through his head on who might have been killed in those three BMPs…

“Snafu! The Divisional RPV assets were diverted by somebody at Division to look up further north or something. By the time they redeployed, it was all over.”

“Good god!” Kongara muttered. But both men understood that such things happened during wartime. Especially given the fog of war…

“They are not cooperating with our plans now, are they?” Kongara continued, referring to the red pins on the map in front of them.

“No they certainly are not!”

“So what’s the plan now?” Kongara asked.

“We will have to find another breach point around this hornet’s nest of T-99s here. Problem is, along this section of the water stream, you have hills on both sides that are unsuited for vehicles and this armor force is blocking the valley between them. If we can somehow punch through, we can cut off the two Chinese Brigades from the east. The Colonel thinks that the only way for us at the moment is a head on attack through the Chinese armor. What’s your readiness?”

“Good to go. When is the jump-off?” Kongara asked. His colleague looked at his watch and then back at Kongara.

“Within the hour. We are going to launch the 10TH Mechanized as a steel fist into the enemy. If we succeed, we could have this Chinese Division on its knees before sundown!”

THE MALACCA STRAIT

DAY 5 + 0940 HRS

“Approaching drop five in fifteen seconds! Standby!” the pilot confirmed to the ASW coordinator in the back.

“Drop in Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Drop!”

The aircraft slightly vibrated as yet another sonobuoy fell clear and into the waters below. The sonar operators noted the splash and then the sonobuoy went active. The ASW coordinator confirmed:

“Sonobuoy-Five is active!”

The ASW crew went back to analyzing the data streaming in from the newly deployed sonobuoy and began corroborating it with the information gathered previously; the flight crew up front pulled the Il-38 up and leveled out sufficiently high that fuel could be conserved.

The Malacca Strait is around seventy five kilometers in width on average, separating Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Singapore is to the south near the southern entry point and Myanmar and India are at the northern one.

Two Mig-29K naval air-defense fighters had departed the Andaman Islands to provide cover for the Il-38s patrolling the strait in search of Chinese submarine threats. A Singapore air-force G550 AEW aircraft had also been detected to the south by the Il-38s radar-warning-receivers.

This particular ASW aircraft had detected the two inbound Chinese Su-27s as the latter had finished their in-flight refueling operations over the South China Sea. The problem was that the Singaporeans could not very well pass that information to the Indians. Not yet, anyway. Singapore was sitting on the fence on this one until it became clear which side was winning the war in Tibet.

Nothing personal. Just geopolitics at work.

So for the moment the RSAF airborne radar operators watched in silence as the Su-27s approached the Malacca Strait from the south…

“Wait! Did you see that?!” one of the sonar operators said over the intercom to a colleague sitting on a similar console. The ASW officer took note and walked over.

“What do you have?”

“Brief sonar contact here…” the operator pointed on the digital map overlay. “Right at the edge of the range for S-5.”

“Check the SAR display for surface contacts!” the officer ordered.

“Checking… clear! No surface contacts in that sector.”

“Okay,” he brought his intercom mouthpiece close as he spoke.

“All right people, we have a possible submerged contact on bearing three-one-five. This could be what we are looking for. Prepare drops S-6 through S-10. Stand by on M-A-D!”

Moments later the cabin tilted slightly as the flight-crew up front adjusted heading towards the target and began their descent. They had to get low for the Magnetic Anomaly Detectors or MAD to be able to pick out the possible sub-surface contact clearly. Sonobuoy triangulation required careful drops which would also require the low altitudes.